Adam Weinstein

Engagement Editor

I'm Mother Jones' engagement editor and Tumblrizer, specializing in explanatory journalism and new-media reporting. As a Navy vet and ex-Iraq contractor, I'm also committed to articulating all things martial—good, bad, and weird—to new audiences.

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Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' engagement editor, having previously served the magazine as its national security reporter and copy editor. Before that, he worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, and the Tallahassee Democrat. He's written for the New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, and Newsweek. A Navy veteran, two-day Jeopardy champion and ex-political scientist, he also did a recession-fueled stint as a military contractor in Iraq. For more about Adam and his writing, click here.

Brother, Can You Spare a Doubloon?

—By Adam Weinstein

| Thu Feb. 18, 2010 10:59 AM PST

If Republican state Rep. Mike Pitts has his way in South Carolina, your money will be no good there. Or probably anywhere else. Pitts is taking anti-Obama fervor to its illogical extreme with a proposed law that would ban anyone in the state from accepting US Federal Reserve notes as legal tender. In place of the Benjamins, Pitts would have his fellow citizens trade only in gold or silver coins. Which should thrill Glenn Beck’s remaining advertisers, at least.

"The Germans felt their system wouldn't collapse, but it took a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread in the 1930s," Pitts told CBSNews.com. "The Soviet Union didn't think their system would collapse, but it did. Ours is capable of collapsing also," he added, apparently unaware that unilaterally banning the federal currency would be a pretty quick way to collapse the savings of all South Carolinians.

It's not clear how closely connected Pitts is to any Tea Party groups, but he's certainly doing their bidding, and not just in advocating a gold (and silver) standard.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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The Pentagon's PTSD Denial

How killing scars soldiers—and their loved ones.

—By Adam Weinstein

| September/October 2008 Issue

In the spring of 2002, an Army major named Peter Kilner submitted an unusual essay to Military Review, a journal published by the Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Kilner argued that combat leaders have an obligation to justify the killing their soldiers do. "Soldiers who kill reflexively in combat will likely one day reconsider their actions reflectively," he wrote. "If they are unable to justify to themselves that they killed another human being, they will likely, and understandably, suffer enormous guilt" that could balloon into post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). Top brass who ignored the issue, he concluded, were "treating their soldiers as commodities, not as persons."

[Read the full article]

Stop the Press Releases!

As newspapers recruit "citizen journalists" to fill their pages, flacks and hacks find an opening.

—By Adam Weinstein

| January/February 2008 Issue

it's easy to see why a local newspaper editor could fall in love with Stacey N. Getz: She's a summa cum laude Florida State graduate, a twentysomething public-relations executive with the gift of gab and the face of a sorority president. When the Tallahassee Democrat combed the community in early 2007 for residents whose blogs and articles could fill out the paper's local coverage, Getz, a new-media whiz, was one of the first to jump aboard.

Getz's Let's Talk Tallahassee blog is a paean to civic boosterism, inviting readers to submit ideas to help business leaders and developers improve the city. "I've found plenty of great reasons to live here. But I'm still not completely satisfied," Getz wrote, "so I'm asking you for help." Her blog was so successful that the Gannett-owned Democrat (a newspaper I once worked for) "reverse published" many of its posts—along with Getz's photo, in color, whenever possible—as articles in its metro section.

[Read the full article]